Poor Recording Quality From Turntables

[Turtle]

Hi all, an absolute noob to audacity here, only time ive even used this was for editing samples in college, which you dont have to be a genius to do. . .

Anyway, the problem im having is my recording quality sucks, seriously.
Im using 2 x RCA ro a 3.5mm Jack, and im coming from Booth out on my mixer to the microphone in on my laptop. (ive heard it works well for other people)
Im also using a laptop (no line in, hence the microphone port) with windows vista, running the BETA version of Audacity.
When i first recorded it was mega-loud, so obviously i turnt down the recording volume, now it doesnt hit the peaks, but the quality is really shabby, i cant perfectly describe it, but the snares are really bitty, crunchy almost. and the rest of the track still sounds like its distorting, it sounds a bit like if your cable wasnt connected properly (i have also tested that the connection is okay, ive used it to listen to many things through my mixer). The strangest thing of the matter is for like half a second at the beginning of the recording it sounds perfect, then it drops in quality, then drops again and stays there. ive tried many different methods, ive even tried recording from the record out on my amp. But then i got no audio at all.
As you probably can tell im usually one to just keep trying till i find a solution, however, i fear this could be a bit out of my league.
Any help would be much appreciated!
Turtle

[waxcylinder]

With only a mic input like that you are a prime candidate for one of the external soundcards that we know work well with Audacity - see: http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=9477

And I hope that you have a phono pre-amp in that recording chain (your TT may have one integrated in it - check the manual) - otherwise the RIAA equalization will not be applied and the recording will sound thin and lacking in bass. If you don't have a pre-amp than you can get external soundcards with integrated phono pre-amps.

You may find this set of tutorials useful: http://manual.audacityteam.org/index.ph ... iscs_to_CD

WC

[steve]

from Booth out on my mixer to the microphone in on my laptop. (ive heard it works well for other people)

I've heard that it works adequately for some people on PCs and works well on Macs.
Macs have a Line input which is said to be of reasonably good quality. PC laptops often only have a microphone input that gets seriously overloaded if you try to connect a line level signal to it and sounds terrible. Some PC laptops have an input that is a combined "mono microphone / stereo line in" socket. Although these will work to some extent the quality is usually mediocre at best.

For my laptop (Acer 5735) it has the combined mic/line socket, but I get very much better results using an external USB sound card.
There are a few sound card reviews here: http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=9477